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You can't buy a hybrid cloud as a product nor as a service, and even if you could you would need to customise it for your unique requirements and constraints. The reality today is you need to buy the ingredients from a supplier then roll your own hybrid cloud and to manage this you need to put in place a Hybrid Cloud Manifesto.

The SPC-2 benchmark is a useful benchmark for bandwidth intensive sequential workloads, such as backup, ETL (extraction, translate, load) and large-scale analytics. Wikibon does a deep comparative analysis of the SPC-2 results, time-adjusting the pricing information to correct for different publication dates. Wikibon then analyses performance and price-performance together, and develops a guide to enable practitioners to understand the business options and best strategic fit. Wikibon concludes the Oracle ZS4-4 storage appliance dominates this high-bandwidth processing as of the best combination of good performance and great price performance at the high-end and mid-range of this market.

The thesis of the overall Wikibon research in this area is that within 2 years, the majority of IT installations will be moving to combine workloads together to share data using NAND flash as the only active storage media. This will save on IT budget and improve IT productivity, especially in the IT development function. Our research shows that these changes have the potential to reduce the typical IT budget by 34% over a five year period while delivering the same functionality to the business. The projected IT savings of moving to a shared-data all-flash datacenter for an organization with a $40M IT budget are $38M over 5 years, with an IRR of 246%, an annual ROI of 542%, and a breakeven of 13 months. Future research will look at the potential to maximize the contribution of IT to the business, and will conclude that IT budgets should increase to deliver historic improvements in internal productivity and increased business potential.

The Public Cloud market is still forming – but seems to be poised to soon enter the Early Majority stage of its development where user behavior, preferences, and strategies become more stable. Large enterprises are more discerning of Public Cloud IaaS offerings. Test and development appears to be a key entry point for them since scale, operational complexity, and security/compliance/regulatory demands require a more nuanced approach to Public Cloud for IaaS. Small and Medium enterprises have the greatest need for Public Cloud and should consider well-established, lower risk entry points to Public Cloud like SaaS, Email, and Web Applications before venturing into Mission Critical and IaaS workloads to help them navigate an increasingly complex and costly IT infrastructure environment.

PostgreSQL Reaches a Database ‘Tipping Point’

The growing demand for Postgres talent at the biggest brands, including the recent and highly visible move by Salesforce.com to add dozens of Postgres experts in the next year, shows PostgreSQL has reached a tipping point. As author Malcolm Gladwell famously defined it, this is the moment of critical mass: The moment of widespread recognition, the realization that PostgreSQL had crossed a threshold of acceptance among major corporations had finally arrived. It was a proud moment to behold for champions of Postgres and it has been a long time coming. And what does it suggest? We’re at a boiling point, and things are about to really heat up.

Two Factors of Authentication

PostgreSQL has always been considered ‘the most advanced open source database in the world.’ Remember, PostgreSQL was born from the same technical white paper that Oracle was created from, and it has had decades of hardening. What’s drawn greater recognition lately is that the Postgres community has accelerated its pace in recent years in developing the features and capabilities that big enterprises require for mission critical applications. Postgres now has many of the ‘enterprise-grade’ characteristics that the large proprietary databases have, such as multi-version concurrency control, point-in-time recovery and asynchronous replication. It’s highly scalable both in the number of users it can accommodate and in the absolute amount of data it can manage.

That’s the beauty of the open source system – developers living close to the software see a need and promptly respond with the solution. It’s the same evolution we saw as Linux took shape and matured. The beauty of the Postgres community is that it’s more mature, more cohesive and better able to manage a comprehensive vetting process for software contributions.

A second driver is the lingering malaise in the economy, whether you consider our current state an official ongoing recession or just the doldrums. Corporate budgets have been stretched now for four years, and there’s little left to trim. This has prompted many companies to begin looking very closely at their core software systems – the ones that power their infrastructure components – and consider open source replacements. And they’re finding a most compelling option. The influences that overtook the proprietary operating system in the form of Linux are now being applied to the database layer in the form of Postgres. This time around, the traditional company to take the hit as today’s story unfolds is Oracle.

Lineup of Luminaries

Salesforce.com in fact is a celebrated addition to a long list of large Postgres deployments. Skype, Instagram, the US State Department and Greenpeace are among the biggest names using the community version of Postgres. VMware has also adopted community Postgres for its vFabric offering. Among our largest users is Sony Online Entertainment, which moved its massive multi-player online games from Oracle to our Postgres Plus Advanced Server.

Rumors aside, it’s ultimately unclear what Salesforce.com is planning and regardless, it will likely be part of a long-term project. At the very least, it appears that Salesforce.com, based on the company’s hiring notice, wants Postgres specialists to “design and implement major pieces of the Salesforce.com core database infrastructure.” This suggests Postgres may be powering mission critical applications that are already, or would otherwise be, powered by Oracle.

The bottom line is that the implementation of open source community Postgres means companies are slashing operating costs. Eliminate a product’s perpetual license fee and you have an immediate CAPEX win. Buy an open source subscription that’s well below the annual maintenance fee of your proprietary product and your OPEX line will improve as well.

Up and to the Right

The widening embrace of Postgres by corporate users has been a boon to Postgres. The estimated number of downloads of PostgreSQL and add-ons topped five million over the past year as enterprises worldwide accelerated their adoption of Postgres and its components. According to Gartner Group, enterprise open source database management systems are now more widely adopted than any other open source technology.

It’s important to note that we don’t directly gain from companies like Salesforce.com utilizing the open source community version of Postgres. However, other companies do turn to our products and services as well as those of smaller consultancies to assist them with Oracle migrations and other deployments that require the kinds of enhancements we’ve developed for Postgres.

Now that the tide has turned with global brands bringing open source more deeply into their environments to tap the once-untouchable database layer, we’re entering interesting times. It’s unlikely, for example, for the 600-pound gorilla in the data center to sit still. But, fortunately for the open source world and companies seeking more cost-effective options, the gorilla is also unlikely to cut its prices.

About the Author

Ed Boyajian is president and CEO of EnterpriseDB, which provides enterprise-class PostgreSQL products and services to help IT organizations succeed with the world’s most advanced open source database.

About Ed Boyajian

Ed Boyajian is president and CEO of EnterpriseDB, which provides enterprise-class PostgreSQL products and services to help IT organizations succeed with the world's most advanced open source database.